More than 100 aid agencies and rights groups, including Save the Children and Doctors Without Borders, warned on Wednesday that “mass starvation” was spreading across Gaza, adding to calls for Israel to lift restrictions on humanitarian aid to the besieged enclave.
The joint statement is the latest attempt to draw attention to a growing hunger crisis in Gaza. It was released after the European Union and at least 28 governments, including Israeli allies like Britain, France and Canada, on Monday condemned the “drip feeding of aid” and said that civilian suffering had “reached new depths.”
Doctors Without Borders in Gaza has reported a “sharp and unprecedented rise in acute malnutrition.” Adults frequently collapse from hunger, the aid groups said in their statement, adding that stockpiles of food and other supplies warehoused outside the territory were being prevented from reaching people in need.
Gaza’s health ministry said on Wednesday that hospitals had registered 10 deaths because of famine or malnutrition in the previous 24 hours, bringing the total number of deaths from hunger since Saturday to 43.
There was no independent confirmation of the toll and the ministry did not give details. Health experts say that deaths from malnutrition are often undercounted because acutely hungry patients often die of other causes, such as diarrhea or viral infections, that their bodies are too weak to fight.
The United Nations’ World Food Program said this week that nearly a third of Gaza’s population, which stands at 2.1 million, was not eating for multiple days in a row. “People are dying for lack of humanitarian assistance,” it said in a statement.
Israel blocked deliveries of aid between March and May after it ended a cease-fire with Hamas. Since then, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a private Israeli-backed group, has managed a new system in which people go to a few distribution sites to obtain aid. The government says that the new system is designed to prevent Hamas from stealing aid, and the sites are in areas of Gaza controlled by Israeli forces.
But the new system has been marred by near-daily violence. The United Nations said last week that more than 670 people had been killed near the new aid sites, many as a result of gunfire, and that hundreds of others had been injured. One consequence has been that some people have been deterred from approaching the sites, which itself has exacerbated hunger, aid groups say.
On Wednesday, Israel’s foreign ministry rejected the aid groups’ claims, and said that the organizations were echoing Hamas’s talking points.
Israel has also blamed the United Nations for failing to distribute supplies that are already in Gaza. On Tuesday, COGAT, the Israeli government agency that oversees policy in Gaza and the West Bank, said that nearly 4,500 aid trucks had recently entered the territory, carrying flour, 2,500 tons of baby food and high-calorie food for children.
The United Nations has said that insecurity and restrictions imposed by the Israeli military often make delivering food within Gaza impossible. Around 500 trucks of aid and commercial supplies were delivered to Gaza each day before the war, it said, but that number plummeted after the conflict started and has dropped even further since the cease-fire collapsed.
The Trump administration has argued that its immediate priority is to secure a new cease-fire, given that the amount of aid entering Gaza spiked during the previous truce.
The administration’s envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, was set to travel to the region this week for talks on the war, a State Department spokeswoman, Tammy Bruce, told reporters on Tuesday. Mr. Witkoff wanted to achieve a cease-fire and a “humanitarian corridor for aid to flow,” she added.
Israel’s foreign ministry said that by issuing the statement, the aid groups were impeding the chances of a new cease-fire to pause the war, which began when Hamas launched a deadly raid on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“These organizations are serving the propaganda of Hamas, using their numbers, justifying their horrors, instead of challenging the terror organization,” it said in a statement on social media.
The groups that signed the statement, which also included CARE, Christian Aid and Amnesty International, said the U.N.-led system that had previously handled aid to Gaza had worked but that it was “prevented from functioning.” They said that only 28 trucks of aid were now being distributed in Gaza each day.
The aid groups added that their workers in Gaza, whose job is to provide support to civilians, were so hungry that they were now risking their own lives by joining food lines.
Civilians in Gaza said the lack of food was reaching an urgent point. A’eed Abu Khater, 48, who said he was living in a tent in Gaza City in the north of the enclave, said that his 17-year-old son, Atef, had been hospitalized with severe malnutrition for 15 days and his condition was deteriorating.
“I had to leave the hospital — I couldn’t bear to see him like this. He is not responding to the treatment,” Mr. Khater said in a telephone interview, adding that the boy had been healthy before the war. “I can’t describe how terrible the situation is. I can’t hold back my tears. This is my son.”
David Mencer, an Israeli government spokesman, blamed Hamas for the suffering in Gaza. In a briefing to journalists, he said that Israel facilitated aid through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and shipments of goods for bakeries and communal kitchens coordinated by the United Nations.
“In Gaza today, there is no famine caused by Israel. There is, however, a man-made shortage engineered by Hamas,” he said in a briefing to journalists, adding that aid groups were issuing “false warnings.”
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad and Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting
Matthew Mpoke Bigg is a London-based reporter on the Live team at The Times, which covers breaking and developing news.
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